Tim Walz is a new kind of reproductive rights messenger

Advocates for reproductive rights have a new champion: Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

The Minnesota governor cemented that role for himself when, on Night 3 of the DNC, he highlighted his work on reproductive rights — and how the issue is personal for him.

Walz, a father of two, repeated what’s now a familiar story about how he and his wife, Gwen, struggled to conceive.

“Even if you've never experienced the hell of infertility, I guarantee you know somebody who has,” Walz said last week. “I remember praying each night for a call with good news, the pit in my stomach when the phone would ring, and the agony when we heard the treatments hadn't worked.”

Walz said it took years until he and his wife welcomed their first child, a daughter, whom they named Hope, into the family.

“I'm letting you in on how we started our family because that's a big part of what this election is about: freedom,” Walz said.

People in politics on both sides of the aisle have shared their experiences with infertility, like Michelle Obama and Mike Pence, who both wrote about their family’s obstacles in their respective books, Becomingand So Help Me God.

But men have not been as open about the subject on the campaign trail in the way Walz has.

“For a long time, there's been a stigma around having fertility issues,” said Sean Tipton, chief advocacy and policy officer for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. “For some strange reason, reproduction has long been considered a woman's issue. … So nobody wanted to talk much about it, let alone men and let alone men in the public eye, or men who were expected to meet some certain model of what it meant to be a man.”

Yet it was Walz — introduced to the crowd that night by some